Business lobby groups slam competition watchdog’s calls for radical audit reform April 18, 2019 Business lobby group the CBI said reforms to the audit sector proposed today by the competition watchdog could “undermine confidence in corporate Britain”. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) today called for the Big Four accountancy firm’s audit arms to be split from their non-audit arms with separate profit pool and management in a major [...]
Ai: The Competitive Advantage July 7, 2020 In recent years, it seems most discussions centered around technology and business innovation inevitably end up debating the future potential of Artificial Intelligence. While the longer term upside is seemingly limitless, and there is much debate about what the future of what AI might look like, what’s less understood is how AI works today – [...]
London Stock Exchange set to send $27bn Refinitiv deal to EU regulators January 13, 2020 The London Stock Exchange Group is reportedly set to file its $27bn (£20.8bn) deal to buy financial data group Refinitiv with EU antitrust authorities, following extensive discussions with Brussels over the scope of its investigation into the merger. The two sides have not yet resolved the issue of what constitutes “the market” against which the [...]
How will losing its London licence affect Uber? January 8, 2020 Uber does not appear to have the controls necessary to run a wide-scale transport service and assure passengers and authorities of adequate safety standards. Despite London being one of the company’s top five markets in the world by revenue, the company has shown a marked reluctance to fully co-operate with transport authorities. Time and again, [...]
Audit sector faces huge shake-up as new reports make radical recommendations December 18, 2018 The stage has been set for a radical shake-up of the UK’s audit sector, following the release of two highly-anticipated reports. Britain’s audit watchdog, the Financial Reporting Council (FRC), should be scrapped and replaced with a new statutory body, Sir John Kingman’s review of the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) has said. Meanwhile, the Competition and Markets [...]
Sainsbury’s: Buyers bet that shares have seen the low April 26, 2019 By Graeme Evans from interactive investor. Trading within a whisker of a record low, a lot of bad news is already written into the share price. Yesterday’s humiliation of Sainsbury (J) (LSE:SBRY) and its boss Mike Coupe has not stopped investors from piling into the supermarket giant’s shares in the belief the chain can bounce [...]
Big Four accountants push back against breakup proposals February 7, 2019 The Big Four accountancy firms have fired back at the competition regulator’s proposal to break-up their UK operations. In their responses to the Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) outlines for shaking up the audit market, Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC all resisted a suggested split. David Barnes, managing director for public policy at Deloitte UK, [...]
COVID-19: How stock exchanges can help us #BuildBackBetter July 14, 2020 Mark Oliphant, Head of Communications at The International Stock Exchange Group, explores how agile public markets can help the economic and social recovery from COVID-19. Stock exchanges have been somewhat out of fashion in recent years and this seemed to be a trend reinforced earlier this year during the onset of the coronavirus (COVID-19) global [...]
Private Equity vs venture capital: Opposite investment mindsets November 16, 2020 Private equity (PE) and venture capital (VC) firms have the same goal: maximising returns. Yet PE buyout and VC early-stage funds go about it in very different ways. Many prospective investors fail to appreciate that the two most popular alternative asset classes adopt often directly opposing methods to drive performance. VC’s deliberate diversification In asset [...]
MPs call for full breakup of audit’s Big Four in wake of scandals April 2, 2019 MPs have triggered a war of words in the City after calling for a radical breakup of accountancy’s Big Four firms. A highly-anticipated report by the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Beis) Committee, released today, said the audit and consultancy arms of Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC should be forcibly divided to drive up competition [...]